Does Digital Marketing Really Work in St Charles?

If you actually have this question on your mind, my guess is either that you are struggling to make digital marketing work or that you’ve heard from another business owner who’s finding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in St Charles to be a challenge. In either case I’m here to tell you that digital marketing does work in St Charles, just as it can work anywhere. However, as with anything, there are always pitfalls to trap the unwary or rather the ever-busy small business owner who has little time to focus on digital marketing strategy and tactics.

Some Common Digital Marketing Mishaps to Avoid
Busy as you are though, if you can spare a little time to read this post, I’d like to share a few mistakes that are commonly and unwittingly made by businesses getting their feet wet with digital marketing, paid search, and SEO in St Charles and other locales across Missouri. After all, when you know what the pitfalls are, it’s a whole lot easier to avoid them.

Skipping the Strategy
Without first putting together a solid strategy, digital marketing can indeed become an endless investment of time, effort, and money with little in the way of tangible results. That’s a real tragedy, given that digital marketing performance is actually measurable, a quality lacking in more traditional marketing disciplines.

I liked the concise way that Forbes contributors Brent Gleeson and Jeffrey Baskin laid out the key elements of a digital marketing strategy in their article titled 3 Digital Marketing Mistakes To Avoid In 2015. To condense their explanation even further into some quick bullets, the essence of Gleeson’s and Baskin’s message is that good digital marketing strategy development requires:

• The effort to understand your marketplace and its trends
• An analysis of your business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• The identification of objectives and the KPIs that will be used to measure performance
• A clearly defined digital marketing budget

The one requirement I’d personally add to this list is that while considering strategy, it has never been more important to include local and mobile marketing as a priority in your overall plan. This leads nicely into the next mistake to avoid in digital marketing—ignoring all those local consumers who use mobile devices to search and to shop.

Missing Out on Mobile
You might notice that at the end of the last section, I said mobile should be included in your digital strategy AS A PRIORITY. It is a lot different to tacking it on as a secondary feature, which unfortunately, all too many businesses do when planning and executing SEO in St Charles.

Of course, this isn’t an error made only by local Missouri businesses. As Stephanie Walden, a writer for Mashable, points out in her article called How to Improve Your Mobile Marketing Strategy, for every business that integrates mobile fully into its digital marketing strategy, there is one that treats it as an afterthought and as a result, risks losing business to the competition.

In short, mobile is huge and for your digital marketing efforts to be successful, you must design a strategy that effectively targets mobile users in your locality. These will also include people who use products or services that you provide, and who might switch between desktop, smartphone, laptop, and tablet multiple times on their journey through your marketing hourglass.

Cutting Corners with Content
To return briefly to my earlier speculation, perhaps you’re struggling to see results from your digital marketing and wondering why. Maybe you have a solid strategy that prioritizes mobile optimization. Perhaps you update your blog frequently, so you’re doing the necessary to drive your marketing through content creation and … wait … stop right there. Let’s rewind.

When it comes to content, blogging isn’t the be all and end all, but you don’t need to take my word for that. Content marketing guru Neil Patel stresses the importance of content diversification clearly in a recent article for Content Marketing Institute, called Here’s Why Your Content Marketing Strategy is Totally Failing.

Neil writes that while a balance is necessary and you shouldn’t go overboard with many different forms of content, you should at least try different tactics and see what resonates most with your particular audience. You might find your blog is less important to your visitors than some other forms of content.

A Great Way to Avoid These Mistakes
Who has time to make digital marketing work though, when running a small business where you’re all things to everyone? A possible solution is to set aside a digital marketing budget and use it to hire a managed marketing solutions company. That way you can continue to care of business while a service provider (specializing in St Charles SEO and local digital marketing) looks after your online marketing activities.

Changescape Web is one such provider of managed marketing solutions. Why not contact us and see how we can help you? It’s easy to get details of our managed marketing services for digital marketing—just fill out the quick and easy online form and we’ll be right in touch to discuss your needs in more detail. ​